Do you have an Escalation Plan?

What does your IT organization do when a mission critical event takes place in your company?

Does the appropriate IT support component spring into action to minimize the risk imposed by the problem, , , or have you even sat down to think about and determine what these issues are and what you should do if they occur?

Sadly, many IT organizations wait until a major problem occurs before thinking about it. Unfortunately, this is a terrible time to start analyzing what you would do in the event of a major problem.

Major issues can occur in any industry, , , some things are unique to a particular business or industry. Here are some situations to think about:

Server or network failure

Remote office loses connectivity

Data interface between applications or outside entities goes down

Anything that endangers patient care in a hospital

Anything that puts employee safety at risk

Issues that can cause financial risk to the company

Things that significantly jeopardize client satisfaction

It’s important for your IT support team to respond quickly when major problems occur like the examples above. To do this, you need some type of high alert process that causes your team to take action when key events happen.

It will be much more effective when your employees know what causes an escalation event. what their action steps need to be, and have the knowledge and tools to be able to troubleshoot and resolve the problem, , , even who the escalation owner will be to manage and close out the response activities.

You want escalation to take place automatically so think about these things now. Trying to figure it all out when you have a problem is not a good time to start.